Reflections from the 1st Food and Agriculture Policy Summit Co-hosted by Food Tank, Global Food Institute at GWU, The Culinary Institute of America, and José Andrés, in Washington, DC (October 2025)
“Hunger,” José Andrés argued at the inaugural Food and Agriculture Policy Summit in Washington, D.C., “is not a technical failure, but a failure of imagination.” His provocation captured the summit’s underlying challenge: food systems are failing not only because resources are scarce, but because governance and imagination have not kept pace with the complexity of the problem.
Across the discussions convened by Food Tank, the Global Food Institute at George Washington University, and the Culinary Institute of America, one key insight emerged: food policy cannot remain fragmented into disconnected agendas for agriculture, health, climate, and industry innovation. If the plate is where all these systems meet, policy must learn to meet there too.
1. Beyond Abundance: Designing Policy for Coherence and Courage
The summit underscored that the abundance of calories, capital, or technology alone cannot deliver resilience. When agricultural productivity, nutrition, and environmental management operate in isolation, abundance can easily become imbalance, inefficiency, and even scarcity.
For Graft Africa, this highlights the importance of policy coherence as a strategic discipline. Governments and multilateral actors alike must treat coherence not as rhetorical but as a matter of design. That means synchronizing incentives across ministries, aligning agricultural and health budgets, and integrating nutrition metrics into national accounts. In many cases, it means the willingness to act across institutional boundaries and measure success by multidimensional wellbeing, not volume.
This insight is profoundly relevant to the Global South. In many African countries, agricultural policy focuses on yield, health policy on treatment, and environmental policy on protection. The result is a loop of partial progress and recurring vulnerability. Coherence begins when food policy becomes the shared language between these sectors, not an afterthought that we stumble on in these distinct spaces.
2. Procurement as System Architecture
One of the clearest levers for coherence is public procurement. When governments decide what to purchase for schools, hospitals, prisons, and military institutions, they are shaping production incentives, nutritional outcomes, and regional markets simultaneously.
Procurement is therefore not a logistical question but a strategic one: what kind of food economy are public budgets building? At the summit, several discussions highlighted the importance of incorporating nutrition and sustainability criteria into purchasing frameworks. Shifting from cheapest-calorie contracts to value-based sourcing that emphasizes nutritional density, local provenance, and minimal waste can turn everyday spending into systemic reform.
For West Africa, this is a powerful lesson. School feeding and social protection programs can be designed and deployed to align with agricultural or nutrition priorities. Redesigning procurement to reward local suppliers, cooperatives, and climate-smart producers would create virtuous cycles of demand where what public institutions buy helps determine what farmers grow, and what citizens eat reflects what nations value.
3. Food as Medicine: Embedding Nutrition in Health Systems
The growing “Food is Medicine” movement, featured prominently at the summit, signals a shift from treating diet-related diseases to financing health through food. This approach reframes nutrition as a component of healthcare infrastructure. When payers reimburse “produce prescriptions” or “medically tailored meals”, they acknowledge that prevention is not a slogan but an investment.
The logic travels well beyond the U.S. context. In low- and middle-income countries, where hypertension and diabetes rise alongside undernutrition, food-based care could strengthen both public health and local agriculture. Ministries of Health and Agriculture can co-develop education and nutrition reimbursement pilots that connect clinical screening to local supply chains so that the prescription for health is also a purchase order for farmers.
This approach is not philanthropy; it is fiscal prudence. It costs less to subsidize nutrition than to sustain illness. It is also an act of dignity in that it redefines access to good food as a right, not a reward.
4. Innovation with Direction: From Novelty to Necessity
If coherence defines policy design and procurement defines delivery, innovation should define adaptability. Yet innovation without direction can amplify inequity. The summit’s debates on protein diversification and alternative foods revealed the need for technological pluralism: investing in new methods while improving the efficiency and ethics of existing ones.
In both the U.S. and Africa, the question is not which technology wins, but which systems can absorb and scale innovation in an equitable manner. This means linking research institutions, small and medium-sized enterprises, and financiers in iterative feedback loops that measure success not by patents or pilots, but by adoption, adaptation, and access.
Innovation policy must move beyond fascination with the frontier to focus on distributed problem-solving capacity,building local ecosystems of experimentation where data, trust, and capital circulate freely. The future of protein or climate-smart agriculture will not be determined solely in laboratories, but in how quickly solutions become viable realities for livelihoods.
5. Culture and Dignity as System Intelligence
Amid technical debates, community leaders and practitioners reminded participants that systems are made of people, and people respond to meaning as much as to markets. Food culture (heritage, ritual, and taste) is a policy variable, not a backdrop, and ignoring it leads to resistance and inequity.
From chefs to community advocates, voices at the summit emphasized that cultural integrity and dignity are forms of system intelligence. When policies reflect how communities value food – its preparation, sharing, and symbolism – they gain legitimacy and longevity.
This is particularly vital in African and diaspora contexts, where food serves as a repository of identity and resilience. Building nutrition campaigns or food aid programs that honor local foodways can strengthen social cohesion even as they improve health outcomes. Culture, in this sense, is a form of governance wisdom. It ensures that reform feels like restoration, not imposition.
6. From Talk to Transformation: Converging Policy, Finance, and Practice
The summit’s closing reflections converged on one actionable truth: transformation requires alignment. Food systems reform will succeed only when policy, finance, and practice reinforce each other rather than compete for priority.
In practice, this means three things:
- Integrated financing: linking agricultural, health, and climate budgets around shared goals such as diet quality, emission reduction, and local value addition.
- Data interoperability: treating information systems as public goods so that nutrition, productivity, and waste metrics inform real-time decisions.
- Institutional accountability: making resilience a measure of governance performance, not merely of donor compliance.
For Graft Africa, these lessons affirm a global truth with local urgency: systems fail not only due to a lack of will, but also due to a lack of coordination. Whether in Washington or Accra, the task is the same: to transition from fragmented efforts to unified intent, so that every dollar or cedi spent, every hectare cultivated, and every meal served contributes to health, equity, and planetary balance.
Conclusion
Food is governance in its most tangible form. Every policy choice signals what a society values, believes in, and envisions for its future.
The Food and Agriculture Policy Summit offered a glimpse of what coherent food governance could look like: health systems that prescribe produce, procurement that rewards sustainability, and innovation that serves inclusion. The challenge ahead is translating these insights into institutional routines.
As José Andrés reminded the room, “We already have the tools to end hunger. What we need is imagination.” The imagination required is not poetic. It is political, administrative, and moral. It is the imagination that enables the design of systems where policy truly meets the plate.
